Argument for enhanced attentional regulation skills in misophonia were in counter to what I saw in my own project

in a 2026 study, Savard tested whether directing attention to music modulates autonomic responses to trigger sounds by having misophonic and age- and sex-matched control adults attend to piano music in one ear while neutral, unpleasant, or trigger sounds played in the other, measuring skin conductance, pupil size, PPG-derived heart rate, and NASA-TLX workload. The misophonic group was shown to be able to ignore the generally unpleasant sounds, evident by their physiological responding becoming in line with their response to neutral sounds when directed to pay attention to the music. The authors suggested this is indicative of Misophonics having advantageous attentional control as a result of chronic dealing with triggers. Interestingly, this interpretation and finding runs slightly counter to that of Tollefsrud and Wisniewski., 2026, where generally poor memory performance was taken to indicate poorer attentional control in Misophonics, although the second study lacked a generally aversive stimulus group to compare to (Savard et al., 2026)